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Threatened? Elian Weizman, ‘Thresholds of Threat: Processes of Criminalisation and Repression in the Israeli Settler State’, in Anna Di Ronco, Rossella Selmini (eds), Criminalization of Dissent in Times of Crisis, Palgrave, 2024, pp 333-355

29Dec24

Abstract: This chapter investigates processes of criminalisation and repression of dissident political activism of Israel’s citizens, both Palestinians and Jews, given the state’s particular political formation as a ‘liberal’ settler state. I argue that the operational logic of the settler state that guarantees the rights and privileges of the Jewish citizenry dictates the strategies used to tolerate, contain, limit or crush dissent altogether. This depends on the idea of threat that—for the settler state—is anyways always grounded in racial hierarchies. By unravelling the shifting threshold of threats, state vulnerabilities and fragility are exposed, in this way allowing us to gain a window into the precarity of such system of power as well as into the ways it can be challenged and transformed.


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Indigenous cultural health and wellbeing? Undesr settler colonialism? Brett J. Biles, Nina Serova, Gavin Stanbrook, Brooke Brady, Jonathan Kingsley, Stephanie M. Topp, Aryati Yashadhanab, ‘What is Indigenous cultural health and wellbeing? A narrative review, Lancet, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: Indigenous cultural health is an emerging field of research and reflects the unique connections Indigenous peoples have with their Country, culture, and knowledge systems. This narrative review explores the concept of cultural health focusing on the interplay between culture, health, and wellbeing within settler colonial contexts. The review is mostly focused on Australian research, despite its international scope. A narrative review methodology was employed, search terms were compiled, and a title and abstract search was executed across two databases (Scopus, PubMed), confined to English language papers, with a focus on Australia. Three key themes were identified: Country; culture, and Indigenous knowledges. Country is vital to health. Culture practices offer frameworks for healing nurturing the relationship between people, Country and culture. Privileging Indigenous knowledges is a means to achieving health and wellbeing. Indigenous cultural health encompasses the interconnectedness of Country, people and culture, demanding a holistic approach that integrates Indigenous knowledges and practices. In Australia, these core components of cultural health must be situated in a contemporary context of ongoing colonisation. This narrative review underscores the importance of culturally centred approaches in addressing health inequities and enhancing the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples.


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Settler Islamophobia is anti-Indigenous: Ryan Al-Natour, ‘“Not Yours to Reclaim”: White possessive logics and the Reclaim Australia movement of 2015-6’, Australian Journal of Social issues, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: Within settler colonial societies around the world, the racialisation of settlers of colour as “invaders” exemplifies how invasion paradoxes operate on Indigenous lands that remain both stolen and unceded. The Reclaim Australia movement was active in 2015–2016 and frequently denied its racism as it protested the presence of Muslims within Australian society. Whilst Islamophobia is a key defining feature of this movement, this article focusses on Reclaim Australia’s persistent expressions of anti-Indigenous racisms. In analysing this racist movement, I point out that it is not enough to observe that racist invasion narratives among settlers on stolen, unceded Indigenous lands are paradoxical. Rather, that a series of white possessive logics shape these racisms, as the movement produced two dichotomous narrations of Indigenous peoples that involved a commodified “Aboriginal friend” trope, or framed First Nations peoples as ungrateful “beneficiaries” of the colonial project that is Australia.


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The fence as a settler episteme: Lisa L. Stenmark, ‘Fences on the Epistemological Prairie: A Settler Colonial Approach to “Religion and Science”’, Religions, 15, 1, 2025, #3

27Dec24

Abstract: Building on the idea of religion and science as conceptual maps of intellectual territory, I use a settler colonial analysis as a framework for thinking about decolonizing religion and science in a way that moves away from abstraction and towards action; addressing not just the ideas, but the tools of control—the fences—that impose ideas on the territory itself. Comparing the Wyoming prairie with the epistemological prairie, I describe the maps, fences and other tools and technologies of settler colonialism used to appropriate Indigenous Land and knowledge, eventually turning it into private property. It is in this last step—the creation of private property—that fences are most important, because they are tools of ownership that do not merely restrict access to parts of the prairie (land and knowledge), but restrict movement on the prairie itself. I describe patents and intellectual property as examples of fences on the epistemological prairie. Because they are legally and historically connected to technologies of settler colonial appropriation of land—including terra nullius and land patents—they are an excellent example of the connection between land and epistemological territory, and show what epistemological decolonization can look like in practice.


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Indigenous expression in settler texts: Johannah M. Bird, Discursive Ecology: Tracing Indigenous Expression in Settler Prairie Archives, PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: Within the broader project of studying early Indigenous literatures in Canada, this dissertation attends to Anishinaabe and Nêhiyaw discourse in government reports, missionary letters and diaries, newspapers, and other forms written between 1815 and 1874 to trace the range of ways Indigenous people responded to changing exigencies in their environments from mihkwâkamîw-sîpiy, miskwaagaamiwi-ziibi (Red River) to kisiskâciwani-sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River). Informed by work in Indigenous literary studies that understands Indigenous literatures as interrelational, including with land and the broader physical world, and diverse in form and media, I approach discourse as a network of relations that also mediates those relationships, reading my archive as part of discursive environments within the broader shifting, contested discursive ecology of the nineteenth-century prairies when settler colonial discourse worked to establish itself. This approach enables me to read with a networked form of attention, taking my texts as contested, polysemous, polyvocal sites in which I account both for settler colonial constructions of “Indians,” which increasingly constrained Indigenous life, and for the ways Indigenous people asserted themselves, their thought, and sovereignty. I argue we can re-trace Indigenous expressions in colonial archive and settler texts, complicating them in ways that exceed their frames and revealing the multiple entries of assertion and creativity expressed in a range of Indigenous concepts, rhetorics, imagery, and forms. Indigenous discourse exerts a destabilizing energy in settler colonial archives, showing how colonial attempts at narrative and conceptual circumscription of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, knowledge, etc. inadvertently preserved, and thereby conceded, Indigenous autonomy, knowledge, and authority.


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The settler religion of Indian religion: Kenneth J. Richards, The Settler Doctrine: Indians, Religion, and the Land, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: In this dissertation, I propose the Settler Doctrine to position federal Indian law as profoundly determined by and organized around the legal, historical, and mythical entanglements between land, religion, and indigeneity. Neither land, religion, nor indigeneity are given natural categories. They emerged as anthropological concepts, pop culture fantasies, colonial myths, racist categories, and legal terms from a history of power relations, discursive expressions, lived experiences, and practical negotiations. In federal Indian law, I argue that their genealogies emerged and evolved in codeterminative and deeply entangled relationships. This means that the application of federal Indian law and the interpretation or construction of federal Indian policy depends upon these categories’ maintenance and developmental characteristics. In delving deeper into case histories and materials in federal Indian law, I was surprised to learn that “religion” was consistently deployed as an important, if not deciding characteristic, in the judicial opinions supporting a majority of Indian cases that, on the surface, had nothing to do with religion. These cases range from water allocations to fishing rights and property law or into the very bedrock of US federal recognition and protection of tribal sovereignty. Everywhere I looked, I found Indian religion. If not overtly addressed in judicial opinions, courts implicitly relied upon Indian religion through court citations, references, and precedence. In the process of my research, while pulling on the threads of religion, I found statements about land. This connection should not be a surprise. Federal Indian law, after all, is essentially about the land and the result of over five hundred years of colonial endeavors to dispossess Indian peoples of it. In addition, for native peoples in the US, there is a considerable amount of native voices and scholarship stating that whatever Indian religion may be, it is almost certainly tied to the land and quite often to particular places for specific native peoples. When the thread is pulled in the other direction, beginning from legal questions of land, I quickly found court concerns over religion. This dissertation is an analysis of the settler-colonial entanglement between land, religion, and the Indian in federal Indian law.


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Settler stories now: Daniel Scholte, Settler News Media Understandings of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline: Discourses of Territorial Sovereignty, Legality, and Justice, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: This thesis uses the concept of the settler imaginary to conduct a critical discourse analysis of
113 news articles covering the Wet’suwet’en-CGL conflict. Specifically, I engage with 3 research
questions: 1) What are the narratives that frame Wet’suwet’en dispossession as legal or “just”? 2)
How does mainstream media express understandings of territory and resource rights in the
context of Wet’suwet’en assertions of sovereignty? 3) How do these understandings relate to, or
reflect, notions of settler reason? Mainstream media performs a discursive function in responding
to Wet’suwet’en assertions of sovereignty, discursively moving claims into the jurisdiction of
Canadian law. News articles create a discursive distance between the present dynamics of the
Wet’suwet’en-CGL conflict and historic and ongoing settler colonialism. I argue news articles
reflect a normative framework of rationality, one that justifies infringement of Wet’suwet’en title
for the needs of extraction.


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With a chapter by James Miller and Natalie J. K. Baloy on ‘Settler Colonial Critique and Indigenous Urbanisation’: Kundani Makakavhule, Karina Landman (eds), Decolonising the Built Environment Process, Product, and Pedagogy, Routledge, 2025

24Dec24

Access the chapter here.


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Performance against perfunctory: Sheetala Bhat, ‘Indigenous performances of love beyond settler recognition in Vigil and the unnatural and accidental women’, Australasian Drama Studies, 2024

23Dec24

Abstract: There has been a marked rise in the discourse of recognition in global state politics in the last four decades. In many ways, recognition has ‘become a key word of our time’. Indigenous scholars on Turtle Island note that the Canadian state has a history of using recognition as a strategy to appear to be ‘just’ and ‘humane’, while relinquishing commitments to upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard argues that, owing to the persistence of Indigenous-led movements, there has been an ‘unprecedented degree of recognition for Aboriginal “cultural” rights within the legal and political framework of the Canadian state’. However, this state recognition attempts to accommodate identity-based claims within settler state sovereignty and therefore continues to ‘reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend’. This article examines how Indigenous women artists resist colonial state recognition through performance.


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Indigenous sovereign engagements: Aleksandr Korobeinikov, ‘Questioning Russian settler colonialism: resettlement strategies and indigenous agency in the post-imperial Sakha (Yakut) region’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

22Dec24

Abstract: This article explores how indigenous Sakha intellectuals responded to Russian colonialism during a period of transformation in the Sakha (Yakut) region. It examines the impact of penal and resource colonialism in the late nineteenth century, the response of local intellectuals to potential settler colonialism in the early twentieth century, and their efforts to transition the Sakha population from nomadism to more sedentary or mixed lifestyles. Sakha intellectuals not only challenged Russian settler colonialism, but also appropriated its discourse, arguing for the designation of the Sakha as a sedentary community in the early Soviet period. They sought to counter imperialist representations of the Sakha as ‘backward’ while asserting indigenous agency in shaping regional development. By resisting and reframing colonial practices, these intellectuals became key actors in the socio-political transformation of Yakutia during the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. The article focuses on how sedentarization facilitated this transformation, revealing the complexity of colonial dynamics in early Soviet Yakutia.


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